Race Report: The Watford Half Marathon

This will be the shortest race report ever. Given over 4 inches of snow fell on Saturday night they unsurprisingly took the decision to cancel it. So instead of my 13 mile run around Watford, I decided to spend the morning having snowball fights with my brother Dan and his boy, Tyler.

Unsurprisingly, they called the race off...

This was all going brilliantly until I threw one at Dan and missed, hitting Tyler square on the head. It led to a few tears, but fortunately he’s old enough to know it didn’t hurt, and the prospect of revenge via a free hit against me seemed to cheer him up no end. Unfortunately the same couldn’t be said of Evie.

The calm before the storm

Whilst fascinated by the snow, Evie’s only 18 months so she was struggling to walk in it and was more than a bit unsure. Dan and I were having a tit for tat exchange when he flung yet another one at my head. I managed to duck out of the way of it (more adept at avoiding bouncers than throwing the stumps down, obviously) but what I didn’t realise was that Clare had walked Evie a bit further out into the war zone, sorry garden. The snowball hit her straight between the eyes and bang on her nose, and led to a completely inconsolable little girl.

She spent the next few minutes crying uncontrollably, interspersed with saying the words ‘no, no, no’ every ten seconds or so. This promptly rendered the match abandoned, with the scores level at one bad parent all. Sorry Tyler. Sorry Evie.



An emotionally scarred Evie gets to grips with the snow

Following the morning’s frolics in the snow, my family stayed for lunch and then headed off for the arduous trek back to Gloucestershire. When they’d gone muggins here decided he wouldn’t be beaten by the snow, so set out for my weekly long run in pretty treacherous conditions.

On the plus side, I can report that I managed 13.7 miles. But on the negative side, it was more than a bit hairy until I got out to the country roads. And when I got there, it was slightly unfortunate that the only bits of road that appeared to be reasonably snow free were the hilly ones, so my gentle run was anything but.

Setting off for 13.7M of fun...

I got back home just before dark, freezing cold and soaked to the bone, having run through huge amounts of sludge and had cars deliberately target me for a game of ‘soak the runner’. Having subsequently checked my route, it turns out I did a similar amount of climbing to my Cotswold run. And I have had a similar result in paying for it with extremely painful legs today. But despite all that, I can definitely count it as a moral victory.

And I’m telling you this because…
I’m running the 2012 London Marathon for the Hertfordshire Community Foundation (HCF).

If you feel inclined to sponsor me to help the Hertfordshire Community Foundation continue their great work, you can do so here:  http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/BenWood2